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Government stonewalling on impact of budget cuts, watchdog says

Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Frechette says his office has resorted to filing $5 federal access-to-information requests to get information on the impact of Budget 2012 — and even those are producing limited results.Photo: Supplied/File

OTTAWA — Nearly two years after a 2012 federal budget that announced $5.2 billion in cuts and eliminated 19,000 jobs, the Conservative government continues to stonewall the parliamentary budget officer’s efforts to obtain information on how the cuts are affecting programs and services.

A day after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the 2014 federal budget will be presented Feb. 11, Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Frechette and his officials were at a Senate committee Tuesday explaining the office is still trying to obtain information on the impacts of service cuts from a budget delivered two years ago.

The PBO has yet to receive large amounts of service-level information from several major federal departments and agencies — whose combined budgets are in the tens of billions of dollars — that can provide Canadians with a clear picture on the fallout of the 2012 budget cuts.

Effectively, the PBO still doesn’t have any real sense of how more than $5 billion in budget cuts are affecting federal programs and services across government, officials said. Nor has there been any official government response about why the PBO hasn’t been provided the information.

The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer is unable to fulfil its mandate if it can’t obtain the information it has repeatedly requested, Frechette said.

The budget officer said Tuesday he’s hopeful his office can use “parliamentary avenues” to obtain information from departments and agencies on the cuts, but says going back to court to obtain the data is still an option.

“The PBO has not yet received complete service-level data from federal departments and agencies, which is necessary to assess the fiscal sustainability of the Budget 2012 cuts,” Frechette told members of the Senate’s national finance committee.

The office has resorted to filing $5 federal access-to-information requests to get the data — and even those are producing limited results.

The PBO has submitted 33 access-to-information requests related to 2012 budget cuts, Frechette said, and is still awaiting final responses on 11 of those 33 requests.

Of the other 22 requests, PBO received only limited data on 10 requests, six of them had no relevant data, one request had all information withheld, three provided all data requested, and two of them said the information was covered by another department.

“It’s unbelievable to me that the PBO would have to go so far as to file access-to-information requests,” Liberal Sen. Catherine Callbeck said at committee.

Since 2008, the PBO has made 358 requests for government information.

Of those, 188 were received back with all the data requested, but nearly half — 170 requests — came back with incomplete information or the data was withheld, Frechette said.

“The main reason that comes back (from government) very frequently is that ‘It’s not part of your mandate,’” he explained.

A spokesperson for Treasury Board president Tony Clement suggested Tuesday the PBO has been overstepping its mandate in some of the information it has been requesting.

“Departments provide the Parliamentary Budget Officer the information that is in line with his mandate,” Heather Domereckyj, press secretary for Clement, said in an email.

A Federal Court decision last year reaffirmed the right of the PBO to ask for the information on 2012 budget cuts that it has now been seeking for close to two years. In the ruling, the court said the budget officer has the mandate to estimate and analyze the cost of any issue that Parliament has jurisdiction over when requested to do so by an MP or senator.

Frechette said Tuesday he’s working with federal departments and agencies to procure the requested information and that there are promising signs, but won’t rule out taking the government back to court to get the data.

“Going back to court remains an option. I’m not saying that we will go, but it’s an option among many other options,” he said.

Senior Parliament Hill reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, politics junkie, wannabe pro golfer and someone who has wordsmithed at newspapers in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. I've covered politics at... read more every level, including city hall in Ottawa and Calgary, the Alberta legislature in Edmonton and now back in Ottawa covering the Hill.View author's profile